to maturer manhood, while the boundlessly generous aspirations of inexperience were in course of being discredited by increasing knowledge of the standards and habits of this not altogether noble or virtuous world. Laurence took the miniature in his hand, and considered it closely, with a twinge of self-abasement. Endowed with so ingratiating a personality, so admirable a physical equipment, he ought surely to have made a definite name and place for himself in contemporary history! And what of moment had he to show, after all, for his thirty-one years of living? Practically nothing, he feared. And the young man of the miniature made better play with his handsome person, and the qualities and talents which might be expected to accompany it? He had been a sailor apparently, for he wore the dark-blue, naval uniform of the early years of the century, his brown hair being tied back into a queue. But for these details the resemblance to himself was absolute. And then, suddenly, with a sense of faintness as though his identity were slipping away from him, and his hold on actuality loosening as he imagined it might loosen in the moments immediately preceding death, Laurence remembered that he had worn a precisely similar costume--that of a naval lieutenant of the time of Nelson--at a fancy dress ball given in his honour, at the country house of certain of his mother's relations, on the eve of his twenty-first birthday. He had been mightily chaffed about his good looks and air of assured conquest upon the occasion in question; and had laughingly replied that he, too, intended to fight his battle of Trafalgar and win it, only that he should take jolly good care not to fall in the hour of success, but to survive and thoroughly enjoy the fruits of victory. The miniatures were oval, each set in a plain gold band. Laurence turned them over in search of a possible inscription. Upon the reverse of the one were engraved the words--"Agnes, a gift to her dear cousin," and the date, "August 1803." Upon the other--"Laurence, a gift to his dear love," and the same date.